In order to provide differing performance levels for a system or subsystem, some graphics processing devices have control circuitry that allows, for example, entire graphics processing pipelines to be selectively switched in or switched out to provide a higher level of performance or a lower level of performance so that different product performance levels can be achieved using a common die for example. However, the level of granularity of performance control is typically very high. For example, an entire pipeline is usually capable of being selectively enabled or disabled to allow for more or fewer graphics pipelines to be used on a given die. It is also known to provide the performance selection or enabling the respective pipelines through a programmable register set that may be programmed, for example, through a suitable driver application executing on a host processor.
However, it would be desirable to have a graphics processor or graphics processing circuitry that would allow a finer granularity of performance control. In addition, it would be desirable to reduce power consumption on a dynamic basis at a suitable granularity level.